User blog:Capi3101/WCRPG Update for September 21, 2015
Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. This past week was relatively slow, and for once I can't really blame real life for it (a sure sign that a vacation is definitely in order). I began my week working on a stat block for Shaun Rashid's Endeavour-class carrier from the Aces Club. While I was at it I went ahead and updated some of the attribution information for the Aces craft with some of the new data that's become available over the last few weeks. I had no idea that so many of the pilot characters in Saga were named after real people, though I suppose I should've guessed that a while back. The Endeavour took up pretty much the entire day on Monday; on Tuesday, I was back to work on Elegy. I spent time throughout the rest of the week working on the "mega-block" of text near the beginning of Scene 5 in Chapter 2.0. It took three days to complete the syntactic analysis of that single block, with actual translation commencing on Friday and still incomplete as of this morning. Five other text blocks underwent syntactic review and later translation this week as well - as might be expected, these were smaller blocks of text. Scene 5 is sitting at 16 blocks complete as of this morning, with a translation in progress and two additional syntactic reviews complete. Another thirty untouched blocks of text still remain. 14 new terms and seven re-purposed terms were added to the Kilrathi lexicon this past week corresponding to 27 reverse English terms, so overall it was a pretty slow week translation-wise. Work commenced on Tarakh'ga - Elegy Chapter 2.1 - this past week. Since this is the first mission to see work, I spent most of the week going back over my notes, deciding on the chapter's structure and what needed to go where. I did get some work on the "briefing" portion of the mission, but naturally I'm already considering a re-write; I'm beginning to consider whether or not I want to add that text to the mission's prologue. I pretty well have decided that the first mission will follow the five-room dungeon model; the necessary events of the Chapter just lend themselves to that model too well. I do hope to have a few missions that are slightly more complex before the whole thing is said and done. I do suspect the mission's prologue and epilogues to take the most amount of time in that chapter, again owing to planned parallel text work. I hope to get some actual work done in the chapter some time during this coming week. So my Plan for this week is to continue translation work in Elegy Chapter 2.0 and begin work on the mission portion of Chapter 2.1. On the Aces front, I'll be working on the Leviathan-class Exploration Carrier. The class looks pretty straight-forward, so she should be relatively easy to finish up, though I will probably make a substitution in the craft's flight compliment - I haven't got a stat block for an Armadillo transport; it lists on the old AceNet site as a craft "out of production" (i.e. one that they took off of the site for reasons, which is singularly unhelpful 15 years after the fact). I'm not giving up hope that I'll find an older version of the AceNet site at some point and I'll eventually be able to provide the correction information; meantime I'll leave a note. I do anticipate completing the mega-block translation early in the week I don't know if the coming week will be more productive or not; I already know of two events going on at my workplace that are definitely going to cut into my break time pretty heavily. I've also begun toying with the notion of whether or not I should add "plot point mechanics" to the campaign; I've seen this idea used in other RPGs, where basically you give players a certain number of chances to improve the outcome of a situation. I think that for some of the events of the campaign they could provide an important safety net, and that they might also reduce the amount of work I'll have to put into providing a "losing path" to the campaign. I don't necessarily want to eliminate such a path entirely, but anything that reduces the workload at this point would be very welcome. I also plan - with any kind of luck - to finish my playthrough of WC1 this week just in time for the original game's 25th anniversary on Saturday; I made it to Rostov in the most common way (by completely botching Kurasawa 2 - though I left a save point so I can try again later) and was in Rostov 3, killed Khajja the Fang, killed the Fralthi, was definitely on my way to Venice...only to be taken out by a friggin' rock on my way back to the Claw......... Well, that's all I've got for this week. The next scheduled update will be between 11-14Z on September 28th. Y'all have a pleasant week. Category:Blog posts